Non-Stop Programming. How did Kharkiv school children compete at Olympics

admin

IT Cluster

More than 200 young programmers from Kharkiv and its region gathered in S. Kuznets Economic University in order to discover who would the best. On 4-5 February there was held the 3-rd stage of Ukrainian School Olympics in Informatics

Kids were in competition for 5 hours a day. They did logical tasks, made algorithms, and wrote programs in Java, Python, Pascal, Python, C++. In general, they had eight tasks (4 ones a day).

Sergii Stavytskiy, Kharkiv Academy of Continuing Education

We’ve got difficult tasks by Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and rigorous selection. Everything is impersonal. All the results are got automatically due to the testing system. Our tasks are aimed at checking how one can make algorithms and write programs. And the testing system verifies all the results.

Programming software Dots controlled participants’ activities. A teacher from Kharkiv Mykola Arbuzov developed and implemented it into programming study process. Various Kharkiv schools, universities and and IT-companies use the system successfully.

Thanks to Dots Olympic participants were able to do the task for several attempts. They could see the results almost immediately. If some contentious issues had occurred, they would have been solved by a panel of judges.

Programming is not an easy profession like the ones where you just need to read the theory and become competent. Here is a huge theoretical aspect. When getting kids to computer classes I mentioned, they were of various ages. I saw pupils of 6-th, 9-th, 11-th school years. So children start to learn to program since 4 and 5 grades. It’s really great. It has never happened before. And now young people tend to be progressive. They еthink on your feet.

According to the event hosts, the 3-rd stage Olympics winners will go to the All-Ukrainian Tournament. And it also exists international stage.

Sergii Stavytskiy, Kharkiv Academy of Continuing Education

It is the case that the winners of the All-Ukrainian Olympics in programming go to study abroad. They enter the universities, and international companies offer them jobs. Lots of graduates who won the Olympics work on Google and Facebook now. They combine labor and study.

Most of the Olympics participants are boys, but girls also competed. Neither age nor sex matters here. All the kids did the same tasks. If something goes hard you can always motivate yourself. As instance, remember that ‘you are a programmer.’ These words were printed on badges by Kharkiv IT Cluster. All the participants got the badges as gifts.